


hope floats

by carlemon



Category: AFK Arena (Video Game)
Genre: Drabble Collection, Established Relationship, Multi, Only good vibes here.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24402631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carlemon/pseuds/carlemon
Summary: The forest-folk and the dead and all their gentle intimacies, all the unfathomable magics in the spaces between their intertwined fingers.Excerpts involving the intersections between the Wilders and the Graveborn.
Relationships: Ferael/Eironn, Grezhul/Tasi, Kaz/Nara, Kelthur Marwen/Lorsan, Nemora/Isabelle, Solise/Oden
Comments: 1
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> a softer world 907:  
> why are you still wishing on that same old star? dream a new dream, dipshit! _(hope floats like a bloated corpse)_

Gareth had not been born from dirt but somehow, all these years later, it comforts him; somehow, on nights like these, the icy bullets of the winter storms that dribble and twist their way into the grooves of his armour almost pass for the surge of lifeblood.

This deep in the forest, the rainstorms are different from how they are in the grave. ‘Round the mausoleums, his grey valleys of chattering lichs and withered weeping willows, they roll back and forth along the horizon, ominous and heavy. Here, all that thunder, all that  _ noise, _ disperses through the trees, knits a gentle blanket of mist and dew: a pretty picture, all things considered, marred only by his withered form, stooped at the roots of a grand oak long-dead.

Gareth thinks he’s been kneeling for days. Lichen furs his armour; all of him.  _ It eats at him.  _ Yet—

—the sharpened pain of the hilt of his blade, pressed into his forehead, feels like a comfort, the only real, solid thing amongst all the luscious green of the forest. 

_ Do you remember—  _

If he were alive the pressure of the broadsword’s hilt, ancient virtuous stone,  _ blessed, _ would leave a bruise. Heavy would the scabbard swing from his waist. If he were alive—

“ _ Grezhul!”  _ comes the voice, bright lightning, parting the heavy curtains of warm rain and ferns curled by hunger and curiosity. Gareth does not belong, he knows that much. Even in— life he hadn’t particularly been a fucking scout—

“Grezhul! I see you!” The sprawling canopies shielding him from the sky above open, then, replaced by fluttering wings. He does not look up, though rosy light pricks his eyelids, chasing away the dark. Tasi comes from sprays of mist and light, comes a  _ rainbow  _ from the dreary damp, weaving in and out of the trees. The cold drizzle of rain down his face and sword stops; when he lets his eyes open, just a little, he glimpses an enormous leaf clasped between her tiny palms.

She gives it a little shake, drenching the ground around them. Gareth digs his teeth hard enough into his bottom lip to taste salt, salt and formaldehyde.

“Grezhul, my friend. I thought you were lost.” Downwards drifts the leaf; downwards dips her puzzled face, mere inches from his yet fearless with adoring. Even curled up as he is, prostrate in his respects to the desolate night, he shadows her entirely. This  _ tiny  _ thing. This sweet girl. 

In twenty years, Gareth has told no lies. (What’s left of him now is cold and sharp and savagely keen, utterly unapproachable. Unresponsive, irredeemable.) But when her dainty button-nose brushes his temple, his heart, the excavated space, it _trembles. (It calls, yearns.)_

Her approximation of a kiss is the lingering touch of her nose against his forehead, rosebud mouth an open, guileless shape at the bridge of his nose, fingers slipping into the hollows of his cheekbones. “Oh, Grezhul…”

_ (o how he trembles)  _

When he lets his eyes open her face is scrunched up, tissue-soft and messy with worry. The rain falls gentle, describing slow, sad shapes down his gaunt face. He probably looks as if he’s been weeping. He probably looks so sad. A sodden thing mostly ravaged by decomposition, kneeling in wet dirt to old, old dreams.

“I see you, Tasi. Leave it. I am resting.”

Sweet Dreamhopper. She huffs and squeezes his cheeks, tilts his chin upward and he complies like putty. She has done this before. Each time she gets closer, familiarising herself, as if, with his shoulders, (“Broad! You, prince, you— y’know, I read of knights in stories! Handsome, just like you!” “I am neither knight nor prince, sweet thing,”) as if he will vanish someday and leave her with not even a memory. “I don’t think you’re resting.”

And the dead are all memory, but the way she seems to commit each word he spits to heart- is different. The Wilders see in odd ways but whatever she sees within him- it's _different._ “I dare say that you are not the one who decides how I should  _ repose— _ ”

“You’re not resting,” she insists, with such force that her wings let her drop an inch or two. She is so close.  _ She is so close.  _ Her hands roam so freely over the metal of his breastplate, as if she could pluck them off if she so wanted. She could. Gareth would let her. Grezhul— Grezhul  _ has _ .

The forest-folk and the dead and all their gentle intimacies, all the unfathomable magics in the spaces between their intertwined fingers.

“Not without me, dear! No way, no way. Not my knight, all alone. Doesn’t work like that!” Her hand slides to cradle his neck as he lets himself face her. He must look so fucking  _ sad,  _ so dishonourable, so hollow. 

Gareth is. Grezhul— isn’t, really. And it is Grezhul’s lips that twist into their rictal grin, yanking her down by her wrist with a corpse-cold touch and a delighted squeal. It’s not Gareth’s heart that beats, really, if it had ever. It’s Grezhul's. And though he died angry, he bears different chains now. (Different burdens, different blessings.) Tasi flails a little, feet trailing in the slush beneath them as he drags himself upward, brushing the lichen from his joints, claws still wrapped around her bird-bone wrists. “I keep telling you that I am no knight. How does a  _ knight  _ rest? Amongst the dead? Either that or at the throne of some tyrant. A sick pity.”

She rolls her eyes up at him, sticks her bottom lip out. Little Dreamhopper, little insolent thing, suspended by her wrists. “Fine then. No prince should be all alone out here! It’s soo damp, so dreary. You do  _ not  _ want to get lost. Not without someone to keep you warm.” Her wings give a little flutter, brushing his armoured wrists. The gentleness, the guilelessness of the touch should  _ burn,  _ laments Gareth.

_Goddamn pity,_ hisses Grezhul, that it _doesn’t_. He cocks his head to the side, rolls a little life into his shoulders. Grins all the wider.

“Your red cheeks are warmth enough, lovely.”

Though her blush flares a little brighter, she doesn’t back down. “ _ Gosh.  _ Then think of how amazingly warm it’ll be back home, in the nook. No swamp in your armour! No giant, rusty sword.” He’s half-cackling as she whines it out, gearing up to swing her over his shoulder, powers of flight be damned, and march, obediently  _ (lovingly)  _ back to her particular corner of the woods, until she adds a quiet, “just us,” and his chest  _ twists,  _ throttling his dark laughter, setting something ashy and whimpering free deep inside him. She twists easily out of his slackened grip, visibly delighted. 

“That was cruel. Just us? Is that a promise?”

“Sure thing, sweet prince! C’mon. Ulmus worries when we’re out so far.” She drops her makeshift umbrella to fret at his extinguished hair, and squeals in earnest when from his breastplate surges a flood of cold cold water. The whimpering feeling, soft and weak, erupts as laughter and Grezhul pulls her close, setting her off into a fluttering pirouette.

“Ulmus worries as if I won’t  _ gut  _ and  _ quarter  _ anyone who draws near us.”

“Oh, Grezhul, that’s  _ really  _ not as romantic as you think—”

“Really, I think not— I am all romance.  _ You’ve  _ never dared speak otherwise.”

(He leaves the sword behind as they leave. With one gauntlet at her waist and another at her wrist, the blade, he figures, does not a princely figure cut.) 


	2. Chapter 2

—It’s the thick of midsummer and Kelthur is wine-red and sweltering, going mad in the droves of flies that drift around him whenever the breeze settles. They’ve been walking or flying for days, now— though, time flows differently around Lorsan, he’s noticed. Time is a silk cloak, periwinkle blue and glittering, draped around their shoulders; a bolt of cloth worn ragged with love, given bashfully, to “keep the hair out of your eyes, handsome; how will you see if we have to run?”; a rolling tempest that he has learned means good omen and safe travel. 

Time hasn’t meant much to Kelthur, not for a while. Especially not as one of the Graveborn. Time, now is each space between their arms intertwined, the excruciating space between each flagon they’re dished out at each tavern they stumble upon, and each night spent apart; the rhythm with which Lorsan presses idled kisses of boyish affection, true and filled with mischief, up his spine. Time is nothing.

And yet— he fucking tires of all this sweat.

“Lorsan,” he calls, to no response. “Lorsan!” The man ( _this man you now love_ , he has to remind himself; you know, _love_ , like in all the tales he’d glimpsed from his stepmother’s libraries, and then, later, from _Shemira’s_ ancient tomes, _of all people)_ doesn’t respond, too far ahead, too caught up in a rhythm of his own over the cobblestones. He's a pale blur in this particular stretch of winding smalltown alley, paws flashing atop the coal-hot pavement. They'd just come from a black-sand beach, where Lorsan had romped and taught him to cartwheel, laughing lightheartedly at Kelthur's inability to sneak across the blazing sands as he usually would. Lorsan is a dancer, yes. Lorsan's fast, yes.

But Kelthur is faster.

_Goddamn it he wants to eat he just wants to eat, why are there so many flies, after all this travelling is there really more of him to rot and plague, is there really—_

With a sigh he slings his shuriken across his back, settles onto his haunches, and then, in a gust, darts forward. The distance between them closes in second; soon, Lorsan is a cool blur of clipped-grass smell and lackadaisical features before him: one eyebrow quirked, vaguely charmed. “May I help you?”

Kelthur's mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Lorsan smiles a little at the vexation shot at him, features softening, all the insolence between the two of them wilting as he leans forward, tapping his forehead to Kelthur’s. “Yes, what’s up? Are we running? What are we running from? Did you _see_ it? Really?” A paw, gentle as a spring breeze, thumbs a lank curl of hair out of Kelthur’s forehead. Despite himself, he leans into the touch. Just a little.

Dura above it is _too god damn hot_ for this. “We have been walking for days.”

“Yep.” He’s got his chin at a jaunty angle and his staff spinning between his paws; in close proximity, they balance out, Kelthur sly and ever-watchful against Lorsan’s laziness. Unfortunately, it also means that as Kelthur seethes, half-melted under the noonday sun, Lorsan tends to fidget. Tends to be thoroughly enjoying himself, if the bright blooming grin across his face is anything to go by. “Yeah, go on.”

“With no map.”

Lorsan nods. “With no map, yes.”

“With no map, miles from Ranhorn—”

“Miles, if not fathoms. _Lifetimes_.” At that, Kelthur burns, hotter than he'd been at the beach. A flash of movement and a blade of grass has sprouted from the gaps between Lorsan's fingers; he blows a whistle through it that the wind seems to imitate before remarking, “someone looks a little tired. Someone said we wouldn’t need to hole into a tavern for what, at _least_ another day—”

“I am dead,” spits Kelthur as pointedly and non-pithily, not at all, _nope_ , as he can, “and every fly in Ranhorn has been following us, and it would be good to know where we are _aiming_ to reach in, at the very least, a few days—” 

He’s cut off (but not really— he’s grown to love the game they play, the seesaw, the dance) by a sing-song: “All great pleasures, great treasures, are found through wandering. Hey, welcome the flies. Maybe walk another couple fathoms, we’ll find a little roadside stall. I can imagine it now. Selling bug repellent.”

Kelthur seethes: “We are not all so enchanted by the world as you are, you know. I have no rapture for all. All this—”

Lorsan’s grin becomes so infernally bright with mischief then that the shadows, the flies, even, seem to shy from it. “Oh, I know. But with me, you’re smitten.”

And Kelthur—

Kelthur is wine-red. _He’s not even wrong_. Time— time doesn’t mean much to him, not anymore, but awhile back he’d realised— this young, he hadn’t deserved to die. He’d learnt to take it as he drew breath, breath and massive flagons of ale and fine bread and fresh berries, easily and gratefully. As Lorsan learnt to wander, Kelthur, following in the shadows stretched loosely behind, learnt to live. Lorsan learnt to love; Kelthur, to lose his venom, all that vicious grief.

What feels like a lifetime circling around each other, around Ranhorn and beyond, has made him a little soft. 

All those nights spent swaddled in cloth and autumnal leaves, he figures, singing to the stars. All that damned ale. He must have made an odd face because again comes Lorsan’s gloved touch over his forehead, ghost-gentle, thumbing the same piece of hair out of his eyes, combing it back over his crown. “How’s this,” amends Lorsan, “we walk another half-mile, I think. I’m feeling a half-mile. Maybe quarter? Then we’ll find an orchard, you’ll kick your feet up, I’ll secure us a nice basket of fruit. There, we’ll rest. I’ll feed you grapes, cut your hair. How’s that, huh? Not bad, right?” 

_An orchard._ Kelthur doesn’t doubt it. He fans out a long-fingered hand to cup Lorsan’s face, awed by the easiness of the motion, the affection. They're brought together as the summer cicadas drone their lovesick song, for an excruciatingly sticky moment, far too close, the wind too still. All warm breath, grins growing. “You’ll— feed. Feed me grapes. Not bad,” he murmurs, then:

“Drinks, too. All on you.”

And with a non-too-gentle yank on the tips of Lorsan's soft velvet ears he’s off like a bullet, Lorsan’s indignant yelp whisked away into the distance as to his cheeks the wind kisses free, feral laughter.


End file.
